False Flag
by veritas-curat
Summary: Sherlock/OC - There's nothing quite like a missing body, a government cover-up and a wheelie bin full of flesh-eating beetles to help Sherlock ignore the fact that 221B doesn't have air conditioning. Rated T for language and adult themes.
1. Chapter 1

**False Flag**

Chapter One

Sherlock was splayed out on the autopsy table, pale and sallow under the harsh artificial light of St Bartholomew's Hospital mortuary. Every inch of him was limp and lifeless, frozen in silent repose as John barreled impatiently into the cold, sterile room and promptly dumped Sherlock's mobile square on the bastard's chest.

Sherlock's eyes fluttered open in alarm. "What took you so long?"

"Your coat. You didn't leave it in the lab," John grumbled, his patience worn incredibly thin. "You left it in the taxi. It was halfway to Shoreditch by the time I caught up with it."

With nothing more than a cursory shrug of thanks to his bleary-eyed faithful steed, Sherlock sprung off the examination table and tugged the front of his jacket back down. "Come, I want you to meet someone."

Less-than-silently cursing Sherlock's ability to remain steadfastly upright after forty two hours with naught but a croissant and two Dead Eyes (so massive John had just decided to call them Dead Seas) down him, John shuffled over to his colleague's side and took a gander at the body that hadn't been there twenty minutes earlier. A healthy looking male in his thirties sporting three very unhealthy looking stab wounds. Two to the upper torso, one through the neck. Nicked the carotid artery, nasty way to go. "Right, who's this then?"

"Our new flatmate. Mugged, stabbed and left for dead on a side street just off Goswell Road earlier this evening. Died en route," Sherlock informed him calmly. "Provided no one claims the body in the next fifty six hours, thirteen minutes, I was thinking about stuffing him that spare wheelie bin behind the shed."

The noise John made was hardly dignified, something between a gurgle and a startled laugh and he couldn't clap a hand over his mouth fast enough. While it was hardly the oddest thing that had come out of Sherlock's mouth that week (or hell, that day,) in John's defense, it _was_ half past two in the morning and his blood was likely 30% tea at that point, so his nervous system was pretty damn well shot. "What, for safe keeping?"

Sherlock's upper lip twitched in an impatient sneer. "My dermestid beetles came in today. He should keep them going for at least two, three months."

"So, you're finally just going to go ahead and do it, then?" John sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You're just going to turn our landlady's back garden into a full out body farm?" He could just picture Mrs. Hudson tiptoeing through the garden and fainting dead away at the sight of a pale, splotchy, beetle-covered arm poking out between the takeaway cartons and bin bags. "Can't you do that here? What's the point in having a state-of-the-art lab if all you ever do is bring your science projects home and stick them in the bloody fridge?"

"He's not going in the fridge, he's going in the wheelie bin," Sherlock announced as he twirled away from the autopsy table with more aplomb than a man clad in a bile and blood-spattered lab coat should have been capable of. "Besides, I have to check the colony every four hours to monitor the larvae's gestation for the first week and the taxi fare would be astronomical."

"Okay." New approach. Time to appeal to Sherlock's ever-dwindling sense of propriety. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but... what will the neighbours think, Sherlock? It's hard enough explaining why you're out digging up and then burying the same damn dog carcass every Tuesday morning for the past month. Particularly when _we've never had a dog!"_

"Damn the neighbours," Sherlock barked, impatience singeing the rough edges of his voice as he snapped off his blue nitrile gloves and launched them in the biohazard bin across the room with remarkable accuracy. "We'd still be in the dark ages if all we ever did was wonder 'Oh, what will the neighbours think!'"

John backed away, hands held up in surrender. "Right. I give up. I've nothing to do with this. But if we find ourselves suddenly tossed out on our collective arse, you're covering the security deposit on my next place."

"Don't worry. Mrs. Hudson's a reasonable woman, understands the eccentricities of my career," Sherlock replied flatly, shrugging out of his lab coat and pitching it into an open mortuary chamber for Molly to sort out later. "So, any luck finding your friend at the squat?"

"Nuh uh," John sighed, shoving a shoulder into the mortuary door as they spilled out into the antiseptic-scented hallway. "Neville had been there, left a few things behind. Clothes mostly, but no one's seen him for months."

"Did you collect his belongings?"

"Yeah, paid a bum thirty quid for the lot. It's upstairs. I thought, maybe you could take a look at it, work your magic?" John chirped hopefully. Something as mundane as a friend's missing husband wasn't exactly the sort of chaos and intrigue Sherlock normally clung to, but if the man was spending his free time breeding an unstoppable army of flesh-eating beetles, it was probably better to distract him _now_ rather than later. Before London dissolved into an insect-infested, post-apocalyptic hellhole.

Thankfully, after a bit of persuading and a promise to do all the shopping for the next month, Sherlock relented and they headed up to the lab to rifle through the box of soiled clothing that was most definitely _not_ worth the thirty quid John paid for them. However, before Sherlock could offer more insight than that the clothing smelled overwhelmingly of piss and had passed through the hands of no fewer than five streetpersons, Molly scrambled into the lab like a startled deer, her mouth thin and white with annoyance. "Sherlock!"

Sherlock bolted upright, gladly dropping the dirt-caked coat back in the box. "What is it?"

"The stabbing victim, he's gone," Molly wheezed, pressing a hand to her chest as she struggled for breath. "This isn't a... a... pick 'n' mix! You just can't run off with any dead body you want whenever you like, Sherlock!"

"I assure you, I left our friend in the mortuary but fifteen minutes ago."

"Well, he's not there anymore and you're the only one still working on the sixth floor," she practically shrieked, jabbing a finger in the center of his chest.

"Did you check the access logs?"

That gave her pause and she gaped rather like a fish for a long moment. "N-no."

With a laboured sigh, Sherlock spun to his terminal and with three dramatic, pointed clicks of his mouse, he brought up the mortuary's access log. "Oh, naughty," Sherlock breathed, scrolling through the list. He had been in and out of the morgue six times that evening, but only the first four were accounted for. Anything after 2.00AM, including John's return post-coat retrieval had been completely erased, suggesting that whomever wiped the logs had been in such a hurry, they didn't have time to handpick. Smash and grab.

"Stay here," Sherlock instructed Molly with the wave of his hand. It was born more out of a fear of someone messing with his lab than concern about her safety, but she mercifully stayed glued to the spot with doe-eyed determination. John, however, didn't need so much as an invitation to break into a run as they flung themselves down the narrow stairwell and into the mortuary.

"Maybe security camera caught something?" John groaned, nodding towards the camera mounted at the mortuary's entrance. The run, however short, left him a bit disorientated and sluggish. John was in desperate need of sleep and knew the second the adrenaline rush wore off, he'd be out like a light. He only prayed that when it happened, he'd be somewhere relatively comfortable and largely devoid of peril this time around.

"No use. That's the first thing they would have erased," Sherlock informed him as he began a thorough investigation of the cold room, crouching and craning with practiced ease. Every discovery sharply tugged the corner of his mouth back in amusement. Every bin had been emptied, instrument sanitised, surfaced wiped clean with a hospital grade disinfectant that tickled the edges of Sherlock's memory. Still soggy granules of pink powder clung to the underside of the examination table. Someone didn't read the directions, didn't use enough water when dissolving the tablet. Smelled faintly of raspberry. Virkon. Potassium peroxymonosulfate, sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, few other nasty little chemicals that'd make retrieving DNA a fool's errand. _Fantastic_.

From top to bottom, the entire operation reeked of the Security Services, SIS perhaps. In and out in under ten minutes, probably far less. Shame the poor fools didn't realise the absence of evidence could in fact be more damning than its counterpart, the presence. Swinging open the mortuary doors, half expecting to find a small armed Special Branch squad crouched, shivering behind a few cadavers. But he found something even more enlightening: his lab coat, flecked with the missing man's blood.

Noting the time with a wry grin, Sherlock shot up to his full height and crushed his mobile to his ear. His smile deepened, eyes crinkled at the sound of his brother's usually cool, refined voice hoarse and stuffy with sleep. "Sherlock? You're calling, rather than texting. You must forgive my surprise."

"Someone's stolen a body from Barts. I'd like it back. Please do pass that message along to the intended recipient."

"You seem to be operating under the assumption I have something to do with that."

Sherlock sniffed distastefully at Mycroft's poor attempt to feign ignorance. There wasn't a corner of the British government he couldn't reach, no stone he couldn't squeeze until it inevitably bled, no MP he couldn't force to resign with nothing but a pointed glare. For as much as he found his brother exceedingly tedious, Mycroft was, at the very least, one hell of an ace to have up his sleeve at times. "You have something to do with _everything_."

"Mmm, yes," Mycroft admitted after a beat. "I'll see what I can do."

Swiftly ending the call before his brother could turn the conversation to more familial matters, Sherlock spun neatly on his heals to grin wildly at John, who was slumped against a freezer door, balancing precariously between lucidity and mild catalepsy. "Good news. Mycroft couldn't even last twenty seconds without lying to me. I think he might be losing his touch."

John drooled in what Sherlock could only assume was a show of his enthusiastic congratulations.

* * *

Reviews would be greatly appreciated. It's been ages since I've done anything of this sort, but inspiration struck. Thanks for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

**False Flag**

Chapter Two

A sound night's sleep and a sausage butty from the cafe downstairs did wonders for John's constitution. And Sherlock was his normal, chipper young self, presently standing atop the coffee table, striking a pose John could only describe as Superman-esque. The wall before him begun to collect bits of paper and print-outs in that familiar, fascinating pattern John never could quite figure out, no matter how long he stood there, no matter how many shots of whiskey he tossed back.

"Any luck?" John called from the kitchen as he steeled himself for a trip to the fridge because it was too bloody hot to fix a cuppa. Worse yet, it was only just coming on ten. He'd had to find somewhere nice and cool to hide out come the heat of the day. This was just ridiculous.

"Four man, two vehicle team. Two movers, two cleaners. Came in through the North Wing entrance," Sherlock grimaced, stabbing a finger towards the map hung across the back of the sofa. "Our man knew something worth killing over. Can't be certain MI6 did said killing, but they almost certainly witnessed it in order to get a decon team inside Barts just three hours after his death."

"And the lab coat? Where'd that end up?"

"University College London. Didn't want to risk running them at Barts. I should have the results of the bloodwork within the hour," Sherlock announced, stretching his arms over his head and giving his knuckles a resounding crack. "More enlightening, the contents of his stomach. People always tend to forget how important that bag of bile is, ignore it in favour of a heart, a kidney, Fancy a bite?"

Not anymore, but the thought of getting out of the house was such a splendid one, John agreed to pay for the taxi fare all the way to Goswell Road where after quick examination of the alley where their man had been stabbed, Sherlock sharply ushered John to a blue-facade clad chippy only a few streets down.

"Stomach contents," Sherlock announced as he shoved through the shop's door that announced their presence with a cheerful electronic ding. "Nothing out of the ordinary for a bloke in his thirties wandering the streets of London alone on a Saturday night. Several imported lagers, Irn Bru, a handful of stale pretzels, barely digested chips with vinegar. Our man was in this shop approximately fifteen minutes before he was attacked."

It didn't take long to find an eyewitness, by way of the shop owner's teenage daughter who had little to offer beyond a loud smacking of her gum and that their man was "well fit, y'know, for a Muslim."

"Not Muslim, he was uncircumcised," Sherlock corrected swiftly and without so much as batting an eye, John promptly escorted his colleague out the door and didn't dare look back until they were well around the corner. "What?"

"That was a perfectly legitimate deduction to make in a mortuary, but not in a bloody chip shop at half ten," John grimaced, running a hand over his face as Sherlock fished out his mobile and gave it an unimpressed look. "Anything else you'd like to share with the class?"

Sherlock's mouth pursed in concentration for a moment before easing into that damnable grin he always adopted when he knew he was right. "Physician, living and working in Bolivia, outside La Paz for at least the last six months. Humanitarian aid, Medecine Sans Frontieres, possibly. Arrived at Heathrow last night between eight and ten o'clock, direct flight."

"You got all that from the blood work?" John's eyes narrowed in confusion, a clear indicator that, once again, he didn't follow Sherlock's logic. Normally, Sherlock took a perverse sort of joy in walking people hand-in-hand through the labyrinth of his mind, but the mid-morning heat was wearing his patience thin.

"He had been taking Chloroquine, drug most prescribed to guard against plasmodium vivax. For at least six months as his arms and legs showed signs of habitual scratching from the itching associated with prolonged treatment. That particular strain suggests South America, Asia, somewhere tropical," Sherlock sighed as his eyes almost frantically searched the street. "Very high red blood cell count, increased Erythropoietin levels, indicating that he had been residing for some time at an elevation of at least 3,500 meters above sea level and that he left his point of origin approximately eighteen to twenty hours before he was stabbed. His body hadn't even begun to adjust in the change in altitude. And La Paz is the only city in a tropical region, at that elevation that could get him to London in under a day. Do you have any money on you?"

"How much?" John paused and fished out his wallet. "I've only got a twenty on me now."

"Twenty pounds should do," Sherlock grinned, plucking the appropriate bill from the proffered hand and promptly marching across the street to tuck it into the hand of a grimy old bum holding a cardboard sign. An exchange was made, sign for cash and Sherlock quickly scrambled for a pen.

As soon as a car passed, John jogged across the road to Sherlock's side and gave the sign an incredulous look. "You just spent my last twenty on a sign that says 'Lost arm in Falklands War, anything helps?'"

"And here I thought you'd have more sympathy for an injured vet. Though it _was_ a lie. He lost his arm in a logging accident, five years ago. Anyway, come, be my writing desk for a moment," Sherlock smirked, spinning John around to rest the cardboard against the back of his shoulders as he hastily scribbled down a message, so enthusiastically his pen tip jabbed through the board in places.

"Ouch!" John snapped, spinning away when the pen caught him square between the shoulder blades And that's when he finally caught sight of the finished sign Sherlock held so proudly over his head. MI6 STOLE A BODY FROM MY HOSPITAL, ASK ME HOW! "You can't be..."

Oh, but he was. Sherlock only flashed his most dashing grin as he waved the sign cheerfully at the nearest CCTV camera. "You might want to run."

Might want to? Will have to, more like. John turned on his heel and scanned the street for the best exit route. "What about you?"

"Oh, I suspect a nondescript black car should be by to pick me up within the next five minutes. Besides, it's cheaper than hiring a taxi to Vauxhall Cross," he shrugged, though his eyes twinkled with such mischief John didn't dare linger. Because, after all, _somebody _had to phone his solicitor.


	3. Chapter 3

**False Flag**

Chapter Three

For years, Detective Inspector Lestrade had taken considerable flack for his decision to occasionally outsource his brainpower to a civilian 'consulting' detective. His superiors considered Sherlock to be a tremendous liability, a wild card they would only ever play when they were completely out of options. But despite his quirks and eccentricities, Sherlock had always produced results with almost inhuman accuracy and speed and proved himself well-worth the text, every time.

But now, shifting nervously from heel to heel as he stood in the lobby of the gaudy monstrosity that was the MI6 Building, Lestrade doubted he'd ever get his DCI to sign off a Sherlock Holmes consultation anytime in the near future.

"Ah, Lestrade," Sherlock's unmistakably smug voice bounced off the polished marble walls as he was escorted into the lobby by two fairly disgruntled looking gentlemen. "I'm touched."

"You'll be more than touched if you keep this up," Lestrade grumbled, taking the official form of release from one of the men and hastily scribbling his signature. "Right. You're going back to your flat. And if you so much as step foot outside, I'll clap you in an ankle monitor."

Sherlock rubbed at his wrists in annoyance. "Don't flatter yourself. I could slip an ankle monitor in my sleep. Have on several occasions, actually."

Unfortunately, beggars can't be choosers and Sherlock was neatly shoved into the passenger seat of Lestrade's not-so-neat car. The floor of the passenger's seat was covered with a half-finished sudoku puzzle, bottle of Tums, two empty cups of coffee and the long-missing gold band was perched in the cup holder. "Ex-wife's got a new boyfriend, then?"

"Jesus Christ," Lestrade hissed as he roared the car to life and squealed out onto the road before quickly apologising. "Sorry, sorry, just... not now, not with me, okay?"

Sherlock nodded tersely, realising he overstepped an unspoken boundary there. This was half the reason why he never accepted a ride. Lestrade was the closest thing he had to a friend, before John hobbled into his life and his flat, and Sherlock really knew absolutely nothing about the man's personal life. Aside from the fact that he worked too much, drank surprisingly little, had an in-turned left foot, had been kicking a smoking habit for the last two years, divorced four years ago, had joint custody of their eleven year old daughter Katie who went to a private school in Kensington where Lestrade had collected and failed to pay six parking fines for waiting in the loading zone after school...

Actually, now that Sherlock thought of it, that was quite a lot. Too much, really. He didn't need a friend, he needed a police detective. More than that, he needed police resources. "I need the passenger manifests from every flight arriving from Bolivia into Heathrow from last night, eight to eleven PM."

"This anything to do with MI6?"

"Naturally."

"Then, no."

The crease in Sherlock's forehead deepened as he furrowed his brows in disappointment. "You realise they stole a body from my mortuary, right under my nose, don't you? Wiped the place clean, databases and all."

"Is this what this is about then?" Lestrade bit off as they waited at a light. "It's some sort of dick waving contest? Leave it be, Sherlock. Stealing dead bodies is hardly the spookiest thing that lot does."

"It's the principle of the matter," Sherlock insisted firmly, despite Lestrade hitting the nail square on the head. Of course it was a dick waving contest, to put it in the least erudite term he could think of. They might as well just have sent him an coded, encrypted kissogram announcing "my intelligence is bigger than your intelligence" for all it mattered. But that, he simply could not abide by. A challenge had been made and he _had_ to rise to it.

And so he did. All in all, he had to admit, it was an incredibly successful recon mission to Vauxhall Cross. MI6 practically shat themselves upon discovering his sign and Sherlock could practically feel the tension and confusion emanating from the other side of the mirror in the dark (blessedly cool) featureless room for the better part of two hours. They had no idea what to make of him and it was fantastic. Surely, they knew who he was, knew of his brother's keen perception first hand and Sherlock could only imagine the panic on some stiff-collared, good old boy director's face as he had been presented with an at-least-inch-thick file regarding the life and times of Sherlock Holmes.

After almost two hours, he had been informed via telecom that he was free to go, without so much as a perfunctory interrogation or even a satisfying smidgen of physical intimidating and torture. It left him completely perplexed, slightly annoying and absolutely thrilled. The thought of going toe to toe with the Secret Intelligence Services and emerging victorious made his pulse quicken, his brow sweat and his mouth seemed completely unwilling to do anything but smirk.

"Please, just drop it," Lestrade pleaded upon pulling up to 221B and noting Sherlock's expression. "Some mysteries are better left unsolved."

The tone of Lestrade's voice couldn't possibly be misconstrued. He was worried and concerned and it might've been touching had Sherlock not been wildly offended by the notion. "That's a lie and you know it."

A smile ghosted over Lestrade's weary face. "I do. Just don't do anything stupid. You're no good to me or the Met dead."

Sherlock practically beamed back.. "Have you ever known me to say, think, let alone _do_ anything stupid?"

* * *

The wall wasn't working anymore.

It was too... vertical. Hurt his neck, hurt his eyes. But the floor was too littered with tables, chairs and other useless pieces of furniture to be of much use, so Sherlock was left with precious little alternative. Rifling through the kitchen drawers, it didn't take long to find something sufficiently pointy, in this case, a handful of steak knives. Spearing each photograph, map, chart, diagram and print out with surgical precision, Sherlock took great joy in fiercely lobbing the knives at the ceiling, where they stuck with a satisfying _schunk_.

Unfortunately, shortly after he ran out of knives but before he found a suitable substitute for the rest of the vertically challenged bits of paper, Mrs. Hudson burst in and loudly announced that the beetles from the wheelie bin out back had found their way into the house and not only did he had to leave the flat all day, but the extermination bill was to be tacked onto that month's rent. "Now, scoot!"

Stropping out of the flat not unlike a fussy child, Sherlock determined it would be a good opportunity to take advantage of his new-found freedom and explore Goswell Road a bit more, since he couldn't get a hold of John and he hadn't the foresight to swipe the skull off the mantle before exiting the house. Though, it was probably better he didn't. The general populace didn't usually respond favourably to a man walking about, talking to a human skull, outside of the theatre.

At least he remembered to bring along John's old service pistol so if he got too bored, shooting pigeons in Trafalgar Square and spending the rest of the afternoon in that dark, cool room back at the MI6 Building was always an option. One more tempting and tempting as the temperature began to rise.

After catching a cab, Sherlock made quick work of surveying the streets, taking every possible route his missing corpse could have taken premortem. It was clear the man had been travelling north from Barbican station, possibly to Angel, likely to some destination between the two as he didn't catch the bus connecting the two stations. Sherlock spent nearly three hours bobbing and weaving through the streets until something in the corner of his eye caught his attention and he abruptly skidded to a halt.

A woman, in the window of a trendy little coffee shop. Sherlock pressed himself against the glass, cupping his hands around his eye to block out the glare as he struggled to get a better look at her.

_Thirty-ish, dark hair, curly, wild, no product. Green paisley dress washed so many times it had begun to fade. Canvas messenger bag fraying at the seams: charity shops, frugal or just plain poor. Netbook, scratched case, space bar shiny: used daily. Small drip coffee, cheapest item on the menu: only here to use the wi-fi. Tourist? Keys on table. Ten year old Volkswagen, mailbox, house key, library key tag, Imperial College, scratched, faded, two years old at a minimum. Graduate student, flat share. Damn, damn, __**damn**__._

Every mundane, useless discovery only frustrated him more. Times like these, Sherlock hated being so damned perceptive. Usually, he could separate the wheat from the chaff and ignore all the thousands of pointless pieces of information the day threw his way, which admittedly, was most of them. That's why he traditionally stuck to a routine when on a case. Walked the same streets, shopped the same shops, ordered the same coffee at the same register in the same cafe day in, day out, even if it meant going wildly, expensively out of his way. Every step of his day was committed to memory, effortless, white noise, leaving his mind free to focus on the things that _mattered_.

Unfortunately, people tended to bugger that all up. That's the problem with living and working in the centre of London. So many bloody _people_. Everywhere. Which was fantastic during those lulls between cases, when boredom sunk her dull, blunt claws into his brain and took him for a ride, but it was impossibly annoying when he had Things To Do.

Upon moving to Baker Street, it took several weeks for him to build up a mental catalog of the street's regulars and irregulars alike. Roughly five hundred residents, shop owners, employees, commuters, students, restaurant-goers and other such ne'er-do-wells would ramble by his flat often enough that he could identify them by their walk, their clothing, the expressions on their faces. The population fluxed from season to season, but not so vastly that he needed to devote much more than an hour or two per week standing by the front window, amending the list.

After that, tourists were depressingly easy to identity and ignore. Other Londoners, less so as they ran the gamut from twenty-somethings in questionably loud clothing to well-connected coffin-dodgers with more money than sense.

But every now and then, someone he couldn't easily pin down crossed his path and gave him pause, completely obliterating whatever thought he had been previously entertaining. Problem was, they were never anyone interesting, really. They were just out of place and frankly, it was annoying. Several times, Sherlock had been tempted to verbally throttle them for daring to interrupt his train of thought by being so bloody boring when lives were at stake, damnit! Well... he didn't care so much about the lives as he cared about being right and more importantly, being the first to be right, but people were generally unsympathetic about that particular plight.

Shoving himself off the window pane with an impatient grunt, Sherlock glanced at his mobile and noticed still had time to complete three more routes before he had to pop into Barts to examine the hopefully enlightening pattern of postmortem lividity created when a cadaver is completely encased in bubble wrap for three days.

Sherlock continued along his route, despite the sun beating down on him with relentless tenacity. He hated summer. The heat, the sun, the garish fashions, bright colours, coconut scented sunblock, stupid floppy hats... sweating. God, the sweating. John seemed perfectly contented to throw on a pair of cargo shorts and a t-shirt when the temperature hit 30C that morning, but the thought of wearing anything more revealing than a Savile Row suit and a Jermyn Street shirt in public was positively mortifying to Sherlock. It just wasn't decent.

Maybe it was time to hibernate. Find somewhere cooler, more temperate to spend his summers. Preferably somewhere quiet with moderate temperatures and fairly relaxed drug laws. Gun laws too, just to be on the safe side. America. A cabin up in the mountains of Colorado or Montana, though even Sherlock could admit he would last all of two days before he'd resort to shooting the local wildlife, flora and faunæ alike simply out of sheer boredom and then it'd be a repeat of his trip to Tibet all over again.

Though, to be fair, the American prison system was practically a holiday camp in comparison to Kathmandu. He toiled away on a rat-nibbled blanket under a leaky roof for the better part of two months before Mycroft finally came to the rescue and promptly made Sherlock wish he hadn't by simply uttering three simple words: "Mummy says hello."

Sherlock faltered a step. _Brother. Halfway across the world. Oh..._

"Dizgotic... of _course_!" It couldn't have been more obvious if she marched up to him and cracked him across the face with a cardboard cut out of her chromosome profile! The prominent bridge, aquiline nose, pronounced orbital bone, slight maxillary prognathism...

Suddenly, his legs couldn't carry him fast enough through the bumbling, sweaty snarl of people that had congregated in the shade along King Square and he nearly slammed face first into a rudely sedentary ice cream van in the process. Finally, as perspiration finally threatened his brow, he crashed through the door to the cafe and bit off a succinct "Damn!" as he spotted the woman's chair empty. Sherlock scrambled back onto the street, searching the ambling crowd for sign of her before whipping out his mobile and mashing the keys with a devious, victorious smirk.

_Missing corpse came to visit twin sister in Islington. SH_


	4. Chapter 4

**False Flag**

Chapter Four

Despite the keen interest of wary, confused coffee house patrons, the woman's coffee cup was easily retrieved from the bin once Sherlock pried the front open. Holding it up to the light pouring in from outside, Sherlock examined the letters ELI scribbled on the side in black marker and determined her name was likely some variant of Elizabeth, Eleanor, something like that.

Stepping outside to swelter miserably in the mid-day sun if only to avoid more wary looks, it didn't take long for Sherlock to suss out who the mystery twin was. Even though Imperial College's student directory was dashedly mobile unfriendly and kept rejecting his search terms. Finally, he unlocked the right combination of information and blank fields to uncover:

_Bashir, Miss Eliane__, Department of Physics, Research Postgraduate._

Clicking her name led him to a profile, complete with a blurry candid picture, that chronicled her academic history with painstaking, boring exactitude. Sherlock scanned over it for the basics. Imperial College all the way, astrophysics, PhD dissertation on star formation and other such useless protoplanetary bollocks.

Worse than that. _Offensively _useless. There were few things more depressing than witnessing, first hand, the vast amounts of brainpower spent on pointless nonsense. Even just thinking about the number of years humanity had collectively spent gormlessly staring up at the sky made his teeth _itch_. Eliane Bashir alone had spent the better part of twelve years slavishly staring down the eyepiece of a telescope, looking at things she'd never be able to fully explore or understand. That sort of idle academic conjecture was worthless, at best. Intellectually dishonest, at worst.

Mid-scroll through the Astrophysics Group's bloated and, yet again, mobile unfriendly home page, John rang and Sherlock grunted into the receiver. "Yes?"

"I thought you'd be halfway to Belmarsh by now."

"No, you didn't. Lestrade called you as soon as he found out I had been detained. I'm on Goswell Road, near King Square. Where are you?"

"Sarah's," John announced with a sigh. "Your beetles-"

"Yes, yes, I know," Sherlock grumbled, halting the conversation before it inevitably turned into a tirade about his housekeeping habits. "Mrs. Hudson gave me quite a lashing for it. But pick me up. I haven't enough cash to get me to South Kensington."

"I topped up your Oyster card last week. Take the tube."

"Don't have it," Sherlock lied, knowing full well it was tucked in the back of his wallet for only the most dire of emergencies. He largely avoided taking the tube or any form of public transit that didn't include a private cabin or, at the very least, a reserved seat and one of those nifty little fold-up tables. Too many people, bodies, voices, words, noises, smells... he'd rather walk. At least walking usually didn't involve trying to avoid falling face first into a fellow passenger's armpit at every stop.

John let out an exasperated groan and Sherlock could hear Sarah chuckle in the background. "Fine, but what's this about a twin sister?"

"Eliane Bashir, researcher at Imperial College. She's giving a recitation at five, Blackett Laboratory, Room 1012. From the look of her, she has yet to be informed of her brother's death."

"The look of her? You didn't talk to her?"

"No. Recognised her. Fortunately for us, she looks remarkably like her brother."

"Twins tend to do that," John replied with a soft, tired chuckle. "I'll pick you up. Ten minutes."

Congestion held the taxi up and it was nearly six o'clock by the time Sherlock and John trundled up to Room 1012 in the laboratory. Worse yet, of all the taxis in London, John had to hail the one with a broken air conditioner. Even with the windows rolled down, they had emerged nearly drowning in their own perspiration.

The hall outside the room was flooded with scantily-clad students rushing past in a desperate attempt to make it to their next class on time, clear sign that the lecture had been dismissed but seconds earlier. Blackett Laboratory was on the furthest Northwest corner of Imperial College's South Kensington campus which was quite handy for John and Sherlock, as visitors, it was significantly less so for your average undergraduate.

"Maybe I should handle this?" John interjected, clapping a hand on Sherlock's forearm as he shifted towards the lecture hall's door. "Since, well, she doesn't know her brother's dead and your bedside manner could use a bit of polishing."

"Oh, umm, yes," Sherlock stammered, his mind swimming with thoughts of tears, tissues, runny noses, the wailing and beating of chests. He was more than willing to fob that particular burden off on someone else and thus, kept a solid three steps behind John as they descended the steps and approached their quarry. She was busy tidying up her podium between slugging hearty mouthfuls of tea out of a mug that appeared to be 600 ml graduated Pyrex beaker with an after market handle on it.

"Miss Bashir?" John started uneasily, shoving his hands in his front pockets as they ambled closer. "Do you have a minute?"

"Mmm? Sure," she nodded as distractedly as she shoved a handful of papers into her messenger bag.

"John Watson, Sherlock Holmes," he introduced, hoping he could get a few of the more important details out of her before breaking the bad news. "When was the last time you heard from your twin brother?"

Her eyes snapped open and the mug jerked to a stop in front of her mouth. "I... I'm sorry, what's this about?" Her accent was that familiar mix of Estuary and RP a childhood of public school in London inspired, but there was a slight Arabish clip to it._ Bayswater, Edgware Road, Little Beirut. Born in Lebanon, displaced by the civil war, emigrated in the late 70s, early 80s. Couldn't have been more than a few years old at the time._

"We're conducting an investigation as consulting detectives for the Metropolitan Police," Sherlock lied and flashed Lestrade's badge, completely ignoring the strained look on John's face. His bedside manner was more than adequate. "So, if you could."

"I, uh... Sorry, yeah," she stammered, shoving an hand through her riotous mass of black curls that the summer heat had not been kind to. "Emile rings me every Sunday, 'round midnight. Has something happened to him?"

Sherlock deliberately sidestepped that question. "This last Sunday, how did Emile sound? Nervous, jumpy, sad, paranoid?"

Her lips curled into an amused smile. "No, about the same as usual. A bit drunk, excited, happy despite being covered from head to toe in mosquito bites."

"Still in Bolivia, I take it?"

"Yep. Still has another year and a half out there. Has something happened? Is he in trouble?"

"Not anymore, I'm afraid. He's dea-" An elbow sharply jabbed itself between Sherlock's ribs and he grimaced in apology. Usually, he saw no point in indulging in such pointless graces as tact and manners when a mystery was afoot. But the elbow was right. If he wanted answers, he'd have to play by more conventional rules. "What I mean to say is, I'm afraid your brother's gone missing. We have reason to believe he might have come back to London to visit you. Do you know any reason why he may have left Bolivia in such a hurry?"

Eliane began nibbling on her bottom lip with worry. "N-no. He loves his job. It's all he ever wanted to do since we were kids. Go abroad, help the less fortunate, save the world, all that. He wouldn't just leave. When did this happen?"

John shoved his way between Sherlock and the increasingly more distressed woman, hoping he'd be able to diffuse the situation a bit. "We believe your brother left the airport in La Paz at some point Tuesday evening and arrived in London last night."

"Maybe he contacted your parents?" Sherlock suggested.

"Mum's dead and Emile fell out with my father ages ago," she shook her head with a grimace. "It's just me, really. He wouldn't have just run off without telling someone. Anyone. He doesn't like people worrying after him."

Then, Emile had been acting unusually, irrationally. Out of fear and paranoia, if the routes Sherlock took were any evidence. Emile had clearly avoided the main roads, preferring not to be seen approaching his sister's place but didn't know enough about the area to avoid the CCTV cameras. That could have been his downfall. Unable to continue biting his tongue, Sherlock unleashed the only question he really cared about. "Is there any reason why MI6 would want your brother dead?"

"Christ, not that I know of," she laughed incredulously, her voice breaking with emotion. "Emile's the most straight-laced, upstanding, compassionate son of bitch I've ever known. He can't... He wouldn't..."

Ah, there it was. Sherlock took an awkward stilted step back as her eyes became glossy, wide and impossibly dark. She finally figured it out. "Oh god. You can't... _No_." The last word caught in her throat, strangled by the tremour that shook her narrow, lanky frame.

"I'm so sorry," John breathed, calmly reaching forward to pat her on the shoulder as he shot Sherlock a positively poisonous glare that simply said '_you twat.'_

But Eliane lurched away from John's touch, clearly in no mood to be coddled by a stranger and rubbed an unsteady hand over her face. "Are you sure? Are y-you sure it's him?"

"Not entirely sure," Sherlock lied, if only to calm her down a bit. Of course it was him, but if delaying that fact would net them a few more answers before she dissolved in a fit of tears, it was well worth lying about. "Which is why I'd like to collect a blood sample from you and possibly eliminate your brother as a candidate. I'm sure the school of medicine won't mind us popping in for a quick venipuncture."

"Can't I just see him?" she asked, her brows knitting in confusion as a tear loosed from the corner of her eye. "Where is he?"

Sherlock and John quickly shared a panicked, conspiratorial _ohshit_ moment before, John finally sighed, stepped up and took one for the team. "Well, that's the problem. His body's... kind of missing."


	5. Chapter 5

**False Flag**  
Chapter Five

"Just a little prick," John informed Eliane in that practiced calm, steady voice that could soothe all but the most neurotic and/or wounded of patients. Mercifully, as he slipped the needle beneath her skin, she didn't so much as flinch, her mind miles away as she her gaze wandered vagrantly around the borrowed lab.

Well, not so much borrowed as broken into, but they _were _operating under the radar these days. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that. After collecting enough blood for a DNA analysis, John eased the needle out, pressed a cotton wool ball into the crook of her arm and loosened the tourniquet. "Right, that should do it."

"How did he die?" Eliane asked weakly as John rolled the blood sample over to Sherlock, who sat perched ominously like a gargoyle on a stool at the end of the room.

"Bled to death, stabbed through the chest and neck," Sherlock informed her flatly, demonstrating the killing blows with a pen clutched in his left hand.. "Completely severed his carotid artery. He succumbed almost immediately to shock which only hastened exsanguination. Must have been lying there, panicked, choking on his own blood for three, five minutes before-"

"Sherlock!" John cried, lobbing a tongue depressor at the man for lack of any better way to shut him up.

"No, no, it's okay," Eliane sniffled against the back of her hand, hastily shoving away her tears. "I'd rather know the truth and at least he's not sugar coating it. Don't think I could deal with that right now, to be honest."

"Would you like some tea?" John offered instinctively as he smoothed a plaster over the cotton wool. Not that he knew where the hell he'd find tea. But, from his experience, most tragedies were best faced with a kettle in one hand, a bottle of scotch in the other. Apply as necessary, may cause vomiting, weeping like a schoolgirl and obscenity-laden texts of varying understandability. Call your doctor if symptoms persist for more than seven days.

"Actually, you wouldn't happen to have a cigarette I could bum off you, would you?"

"I, uh... I don't," John grimaced in apology.

"I do!" Sherlock chirped as he expertly pocketed the small vial of blood as he pretended to load it into the centrifuge. No point in wasting time and effort on determining something he already knew; her brother was dead. However, the charade gave him ample opportunity to wring every bit of information out of her in one go while the uncertainty of her brother's death kept her emotions largely in check.

Making their way out of the building and onto ground level, Sherlock was faced with an entirely new dilemma. He hadn't smoked in over fifteen months, three days, twelve hours and thirty-seven minutes and he needed a pack of cigarettes, fast. A shop would take too long, would give Eliane ample opportunity to clam up or make up a excuse to leave. But, there were no machines in sight so Sherlock was left with only one option and promptly dug his shoulder into the chest of a passing student, stunning the poor fool just long enough to slip a crushed pack of fags and an obscenely neon pink lighter out in his back pocket. "Oh, terribly sorry."

The student skittered off without so much as a threat to "Watch it!" as they popped out onto the street and gladly tucked themselves under the shade of the hunched sycamores. With a flourish, Sherlock produced the pack, gave it a sound smack and held it open in offering.

Eliane clutched the cigarette awkwardly and the apprehension tugging at her lips was a clear indicator that "You've never smoked a day in your life."

"Yeah, just felt like I should give it a shot, y-you know?" she laughed nervously as the cigarette trembled in the corner of her mouth. "That's what people say in times like these. _God, I need a cigarette_."

With a soft smile, Sherlock gently flicked the lighter with practiced ease and held it in front of her, careful not to singe the strands of hair that whipped about in the welcomed cool breeze. All bad habits have to start somewhere, after all, and he always did enjoy witnessing the vices of others. "Hold still."

She did, just long enough to inhale and swallow a lung full of smoke that promptly came coughing right back up. "Oh god, that's... that's horrible!" Eliane gasped, her eyes watering in disgust as she waved the cigarette wildly at him. "Here, take it, take it!"

"It's something of an acquired taste," Sherlock smirked, gladly plucking up the enthusiastically proffered cigarette and taking a long, smooth drag. Despite the cacophony of choking, wheezing and oddly enough, laughing, the familiarity of leisurely smoking was remarkably soothing. The smoking ban had put a serious damper on his once rampant habit and Sherlock nearly forgot how satisfying and calming the ritual was, nicotine aside. The shape, the feel of it between his fingers, the warm curls of smoke that tickled the insides of his mouth...

"I guess I should leave you two alone then," Eliane proclaimed with a crooked little smile that didn't reach her eyes.

"Hmm? Ah, sorry," Sherlock apologised and the cigarette fluttered from his lips. "Your brother... what can you tell me about his time in Bolivia?"

The wind picked up and Eliane wrapped her arms around herself, shifting apprehensively from foot to foot. "He's been there since February. Lives in a shitty little hotel in El Alto. It's sort of a shanty town on the highlands outside of La Paz. Four days a week, he works at the free clinic and every Tuesday and Friday, he runs supplies to a couple of villages in the valley. Sunday's his only day off."

It didn't take long to exhaust all relevant avenues of questioning and extract what he needed. Emile volunteered with the Cross of Saint Luke, a Catholic medical charity that operated primarily in South and Central America. Those were often the only types of charities that could succeed there, unmolested by the local malefactors. God was a very strong deterrent and a damn fine guard dog to have on your side of the fence in place like Bolivia.

Gregarious, lively, passionate about rock climbing and something of an adrenaline junkie, Emile Bashir had truly been suited for that kind of charity work. City life had begun to wear on him and at every possible chance, Emile would run off to some exotic location that could only reached by way of an two international flight, a rickety puddle hopper, a ferry and a fifteen mile hike through insect/crocodile/undiscovered hostile Amazonian tribe-infested terrain, at a minimum. Whatever happened to scare him Emile off, to send him running back home with his tail between his legs had to have been big. Murder big. MI6 cover-up big. _Big _big.

Promising to text as soon as the DNA results were in, Sherlock plugged Eliane's number into his mobile and they parted with a remarkably civil handshake given the situation. He might have felt a twitch of sadness as he watched her amble listlessly down the street, that is, if he hadn't been frustrated beyond belief.

Eliane hadn't told him anything he couldn't have inferred or researched himself, her brother's name aside. Sometimes, he wondered why he even bothered interacting with people when the evidence often spoke louder and clearer than they did. To make matters worse, the wind had kicked up not only Eliane's hair, but the skirt of her dress as well, battering the fabric against her legs the most distracting fashion. Several times, he found his fingers itching for some way to stop that damned fabric from-

A crippling wave of nausea slammed into Sherlock like a freight train, sending him reeling back against the trunk of a thankfully sturdy sycamore. His mind swam with panic and alarm as he ran down every last thing he had consumed or been exposed to in the last four hours, in reverse order. But there was only one rational deduction to be made. Dizzy, piercing headache, heart palpitations, chest pain... Sherlock shakily withdrew his mobile.

_I've been poisoned by MI6. Send help. SH_

Hardly the last words Sherlock thought he'd ever text, but as he slid down the trunk of the tree, clutching his chest, he couldn't think of anything more befitting a life like his, a man like him. Somehow, he always knew he'd end up getting culled like this. All he had to do was step on the wrong toes, make himself a nuisance to the wrong people and... his mobile beeped.

_No. You OD'd on nicotine. You smoked 3 fags while wearing 2 patches. -John_

Sherlock stiffened and scrambled for the pack of cigarettes, confirming that yes, he had unknowingly smoked three of them in barely ten minutes. He couldn't have... How did John...

Struggling to his feet and smoothing the front of his jacket in a fluster, Sherlock's gaze shot to the health center where John waved at him gleefully through a second story window. Seconds later, Sherlock's mobile chimed again.

_Prat. -John_


	6. Chapter 6

**False Flag**

Chapter Six

Good news. The exterminators _weren't _exterminators and Sherlock's beetle colony had survived the afternoon largely intact and unmolested. And after a quick power nap in the back of the taxi back to Baker Street and a double espresso, Sherlock was the very picture of health.

Bad news. The exterminators _weren't _exterminators, the flat had been tossed and bugged and the skull most invariably had been subjected to at least one butchered Shakespeare monologue, if not two. _How unprofessional_.

The dust around Sherlock's books had been disturbed, his magazines reorganised, his slippers straightened after someone had inadvertently kicked them while trying to reach above the mantle to toy about with the skull. As John wandered into the kitchen, oblivious as always, Sherlock dove onto his knees and felt around under the coffee table for the hidden panel he had installed one particularly dreary, boring afternoon when the builders across the street had left their power tools unattended. A latch gave with a click and Sherlock dumped the tray of goodies on the floor, rifling through the miscellaneous electronics with unbridled glee. Finally, things were picking up.

John popped his head out of the kitchen, alarmed by the commotion. "What are you doing?"

"Assembling my non-linear junction detector," Sherlock announced, snapping together and then brandishing the three-foot metal detector-esque wand around like a sword. "Christmas gift from Mycroft... 1996, I believe. Handy little thing to have around the house."

"That's a remarkably unhelpful."

"It emits a spectrally pure RF signal and detects the harmonic signals reflected off the junctions of p-type and n-type semiconductors," Sherlock explained in one quick laboured breath as he hopped on the back of the sofa and ran the device along the top of the wall.

"Sorry, you're going to have to go even more low tech than that," John announced, though he had a pretty good idea what Sherlock was on about. But how he loved forcing the cocky bastard to use layman's terms - the technical equivalent of baby talk - whenever possible.

"It's a bug detector," he sighed as he hopped off the sofa and onto the desk, sending papers and pens flying. Balancing precariously on his tip toes, Sherlock grappled with the swinging overhead lamp for a moment, but emerged with a victorious grin and a small bundle of wires clutched in his right hand. "This is like an easter egg hunt!"

"Well, if you find some mini eggs, toss them my way. I'm starving," John shouted back from the kitchen where he slammed two pieces of bread in the toaster and combed the pantry for something vaguely edible to compliment his toast. It was always a bit of a minefield in there. Unlabeled salt shakers from the cafe downstairs full of sodium hydroxide. Coffee tins full of pH indicator strips. Bacterial cultures inside jars of Marmite, though, he'd be hard pressed to taste the difference.

Luckily, the jar of Nutella John bought two weeks ago still smelled, looked and tasted enough like Nutella for him to risk smearing it across his toast. After an experimental bite, John declared his snack fit for human consumption and padded into the living room to watch Sherlock swing about the flat like Spiderman with an inner ear problem.

"Oh you clever..." Sherlock purred from atop his favourite chair as he waved the detector over his skull on the mantle. Snatching it up, he gave the skull an apologetic stroke across the sutura coronalis before flipping it over and wrenching off its mandible with a great loud pop that made John wince. There was a small cylindrical device barely an inch long with a thin antenna taped to the underside of the palatine bone, the roof of the poor thing's mouth. "Have you ever blogged about Harrison?"

"Harrison?"

"Harrison, the skull. _Harrison_," Sherlock replied with a slightly offended look. "Have you?"

"No, no," John shook his head as flopped down on his customary chair opposite and balanced his plate on the arm. "Don't want people thinking I live with a nutter, now, do I?"

Anything that wasn't bolted down rattled as Sherlock hopped off the back of the chair and landed noisily on the carpet. A magnifying glass appeared out of nowhere as Sherlock held the bugging device under his desk lamp. "It's a G75 Bravo wireless transceiver, picks up audio within fifty feet, signal can be detected within..." Sherlock rose and carried the device to the front window, pushing back the curtains. "Well, certainly within range the flat across the street that has been empty for months, but now suddenly appears to be occupied."

John abandoned the last overly-crunchy bits of toast and scampered over to Sherlock's side, where indeed, curtains had been hung in the window across the street. Ever since Moriarty blew up the damn place below it up, the property manager hadn't been able to shift the flat since. Until now.

"So, John," Sherlock crooned into the device as he tossed his most trusted friend a cheeky grin. "Let's introduce ourselves to the new neighbours, shall we?"

After hiking up the fire escape and climbing down through the roof access, Sherlock made quick work of the flat's lock by way of a bump key that needed only a sound whack to freely turn the handle while John wielded the Browning, aiming it squarely at the entrance. He knew they didn't so much a stand a chance against a room of armed spooks, but there was precious little else he could do.

The door swung open with a creek and they stepped in warily, one at time. The flat was dark, eerily silent and startlingly empty. Aside from the new curtains that covered the front windows, the place was completely undisturbed save for two piles of crisp white paper neatly lying in the center of a dirty, threadbare rug.

Two copies of the Official Secrets Act. There was a sticky note pinned to the top of the left copy and Sherlock snatched it up, cursing aloud as he recognised that tight, narrow script he'd come to associate with backhanded birthday congratulations and garish Christmas cards.

_Sign it or sod off._

_Warmest regards,_

_Mycroft Holmes_


	7. Chapter 7

**False Flag**

Chapter Seven

So, sod off, they did.

Or at least, they gave the general appearance of sodding off because Sherlock had avoided signing the Official Secrets Act for almost twenty years and he wasn't about to slip up now. However, he had invested far too much time and taxi fare in this whole caper to let something a silly as spending the rest of his life rotting away in a secret military prison deter him from the truth.

As they stomped back up to the flat in apparent defeat, their buzz thoroughly harshed, Sherlock's eyes darted across the room, half-expecting Mycroft to ooze out of a shadowy corner, wearing a nehru jacket and stroking a white cat. He always did have a flare for the dramatic.

Though, the fact that his brother, the British government's most influential grey eminence cared enough about Bashir's death spoke volumes. Mycroft wouldn't have sullied his hands with the affairs of MI6, stooped so low as to frighten his brother off with the Official Secrets Act unless there was political significance in the man's death.

Unfortunately, as much as Sherlock itched to jump online and devour every article he could find surrounding Bolivian-British relations, he knew every step he took would be under incredible scrutiny. Without the tools to properly flush out every bug in the flat, Sherlock was pinned to the spot. Every action, every word, every keystroke made in 221B was undoubtedly being transmitted to some nondescript black panelled van somewhere in Marylebone. He had to make his surrender look convincing.

Plucking his prybar out of the hall closet, Sherlock gave the corner of the rug a swift kick and flopped down on the hardwood floor. Dirt and dust hung listlessly in the air as he began prying up floor boards at random, not exactly sure where he'd hidden the damn thing. It tended to move around the flat during his states of boredom-induced delirium, but eventually, he struck gold and fished out a dusty little coronation tin.

"Do I even want to know what's in there?" John croaked from the doorway with an unamused, lethargic grimace. "Actually, no. I don't. Put the boards back when you're done. I'm going to bed."

"Night," Sherlock waved him off and waited until he heard John's door latch closed before he launched himself into the kitchen. Normally, he'd try to hide this particular vice from John, knowing how greatly the man disapproval of drugs and addicts, his sister's alcoholism a point of great contention. But as the seven percent solution in Sherlock's unsteady hand shook and jittered as he slipped the needle beneath his skin in that unforgettable and unforgivable ritual, he kept telling himself he had to make his surrender look convincing.

* * *

John was understandably upset upon waking up. While the floor had mercifully been put back together, the kitchen faucet had been left running all night. The laundry Mrs. Hudson brought up the evening before had been strewn about the flat with wild abandon. The freezer door was wide open and something had leaked a viscous pink fluid all over the floor. And worst of all, Sherlock was half-naked, curled up on the sofa with Harrison tucked in the crook of his arm.

It was too damn hot to complain or throw a proper fit, so John took the high road, shoved a knee into Sherlock's back and pressed a cup of coffee - black, two sugars - into the limp, boneless hand. "Drink this."

"Is it poison?" Sherlock mumbled with surprising coherency from beneath the Union Jack pillow. "It's all right. I'd understand if it were."

"No," John sighed, letting go of the cup once he was sure Sherlock had a sound hold of it. "You look like you've already had enough poison. It's just coffee."

The pillow and Harrison hit the ground as Sherlock rolled onto his side with a groan, stretching leisurely like a cat before taking an experimental, gravity-defying sip of coffee. "What time is it?"

"Half ten."

"Jeremy Kyle?"

John nodded with an exhausted chuckle. "Jeremy Kyle."

It had been agreed earlier in the month that clothing had become their greatest obstacle in keeping cool on the days they simply hung about the flat. And so, as long as certain vital areas remained covered and the flat's doors were locked at all times, it would be perfectly acceptable for them to lounge around in their pants in front of an oscillating fan as they took turns hurling obscenities at the television.

Halfway through a heartwarming, soft-focus, piano-accented montage about a hooker with a heart of gold, Sherlock's mobile beeped and he scooped it up, scrolling through the new message with mild interest. Until he got to the last word and bolted out of his seat, kicking over the fan in the process._ To hell with surrender!_

"What?" John startled, struggling to upright himself even though he was fairly certain his skin had melted and fused to cushion by that point. "Who was that?"

"Eliane Bashir. Her brother's body has been found!" Sherlock's pale limbs and pale eyes jagged sharply around the room as snatched a fresh pair of trousers of the left horn of his wall-mounted steer skull and his wallet off the mantle.

John could only describe Sherlock's toothy, indecently estatic grin as the harbinger of doom it usually was and steeled himself for the response to "Where?"

"_Bolivia._"


	8. Chapter 8

**False Flag**

Chapter Eight

Neatly trimmed nails, ill fitting borrowed clothing, picture of two smiling children tucked in the sun visor, printed on thin, glossy paper, print on the back: cut out of a magazine. Didn't turn his head: hiding an ear piece in his right ear. Sweaty brow, white knuckles at ten and two, straight back, neatly shorn hair, wedding ring two sizes too large, sensible shoes with barely a scuff on them.

The cabbie was predictably a nervous junior field officer, fresh out of training. It was like they weren't even trying anymore. Did they really think that little of Sherlock Holmes?

"Vauxhall Cross, then?" Sherlock chirped as he flung himself in the back of the taxi. "I hope you'll at least let me ring my solicitor this time?"

The 'cabbie' tensed and his hands tightened around the steering wheel. "T-there's a mobile in the seat in front of you. Press pound and six."

John dug around in the seats with a determined grimace, discovering a cheap, no-frills, pay-as-you-go mobile tucked in the fold-up seat before him. "Some James Bondery this is," he grunted and slid the mobile into Sherlock's outstretched hand.

_# 6. Ringing._

"Ah, Sherlock. I pray you slept well," Mycroft's dulcet tones promptly crooned in his ear. Sherlock did _not _have time for this and gave serious thought to pitching the mobile at the next bicycle courier that whizzed past. "Ah-ah... hear me out first, dear brother."

"I'm not going to sign those papers," Sherlock bit off as the taxi took off down Baker Street.

"I know. Your greatest fear, becoming a crown servant," Mycroft chuckled softly. "But I had to make a convincing attempt to scare you off. As you well know... or rather, as you don't, there's a new party in power, or so they like to think and you know how these things go, a new broom sweeps clean. And I'm afraid inadvertently caught the eye of their new broom, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee after I made a joke at yesterday's meeting about your missing body."

"Bad luck," Sherlock clucked, the corner of his mouth twitching in a smile. "But the stuffy old cabinet could do with a bit of spring cleaning, don't you think?"

"I'm trying to hire you, Sherlock," Mycroft grumbled impatiently. "Under the table, of course. Officially, you're an annoying, bothersome little miscreant that I've given up trying to keep under control. Unofficially, I'm giving you carte blanche to figure out what the hell is going on under my nose."

"Then, get me the coroner's report on Emile Bashir."

"Under your seat. Though I doubt there's anything of great interest there. A little money goes a long way in an emerging and developing economy like Bolivia," Mycroft chuckled darkly. "Don't call me, I'll call you. And please, do _try_ keep the civilian causalities to a minimum this time, Sherlock."

Slapping the mobile shut and tossing it on the seat beside him, Sherlock's nimble fingers quickly found a folder taped to the bottom and yanked it out.

"Well, that was fast," John snorted in amusement as he peered over Sherlock's shoulder at the report. Barely half a page long, in Spanish, though the handwriting was so illegible that even Sherlock would admit that was little more than an educated guess.

The photographs, however, were quite enlightening. The first showed Bashir's body laying face down in a shallow, polluted puddle of water on the side of a muddy gravel road, dressed in street clothes and half hidden by brush and soggy water-logged rubbish. His clothing was covered in what was most likely animal blood, given the way it was tossed in great volumes haphazardly over the body after it had been staged. His arms and legs were stiff and bent at unusual, unnatural angles, likely to due to the fact that moving a body in the throes of rigor mortis was an incredible chore.

The second photograph could have easily been taken at Barts. Head and shoulders, sickly pale, face slack, glossy like wax under the bright, unforgiving fluorescent lights. It was startling to see that face again. Barely forty-eight hours earlier, he was just another unclaimed body, ripe for experimentation and Sherlock had been more concerned about his bone density than how to ended up in the mortuary. And now, the man had completely consumed every thought from that moment 'till now. A neat thin mouth made for smiling, dark fathomless eyes... it was damned distracting how much he looked like his sister and unwilling to let his mind linger on the subject, Sherlock sharply turned back towards the report.

"The body was discovered by local police at 4:37AM, GMT minus four. Eighteen hours after he disappeared from Barts," Sherlock breathed as he trailed a finger along the report. "Military flight, possibly American given the lack of long-range aircraft available in London at a such short notice. Quick drive up to RAF Mildenhall, hop a C-5 Galaxy to an air base in Honduras, short private charter to La Paz to stage the body before the morning rush hour. Easily accomplished in under eighteen hours. The American involvement is a bit disheartening, but then again, that could be said of _any_ American involvement."

John slumped back against his seat with a dramatic sigh and began wringing his hands together. "Why do I have the feeling that I'm suddenly in over my head?"

Sherlock grinned with an impish little wink as the taxi slowed to a stop outside the coffee shop on Goswell Road. "That's because, my dear Dr. Watson, you are."


	9. Chapter 9

**False Flag**

Chapter Nine

Eliane and her flat looked like hell.

Cardboard boxes labeled EMILE littered every flat surface in the small bedsit, save for a cozy little nook by the sofa that held a cushion, two empty bottles of wine and a laptop. No sign of a glass on the floor or in the sink; she must've been slugging it right from the bottle, Sherlock noted with amusement as they entered the small, cramped space.

"Sorry about the mess," Eliane slurred slightly as she scrubbed a hand through her bedraggled hair and began to shift boxes off the sofa. "I pulled all this stuff out of storage last night. Couldn't sleep."

"Here, let me help," John offered, despite his shoulder and hoisted a particularly heavy box labeled BOOKS into Sherlock's unsuspecting arms. "Find anything interesting?"

"Not really. I thought maybe there'd be something. You know, a strongbox full of passports and foreign currency, that sort of thing," she smiled weakly, kicking a box under the coffee table.

Sherlock had to pipe up, his curiosity piqued. "You seem to be doing much better than yesterday."

"Oh, don't worry," she sniffled, wiggling the two empty bottles and a handful of crumpled tissues at him with a weak grin. "As soon as you two are gone, business as usual. I'm not nearly done feeling sorry for myself. I've got a few days of crying, vomiting, wailing left me in, I'd say."

"I'd recommend you switch to vodka, then," Sherlock informed her, folding his long arms in front of him as he watched John lug the last box off the sofa. "It doesn't stain your teeth that hideous shade of purple, your clothing as well, It has fewer impurities, less likely to leave you with a hangover the next morning. Easier to succumb to alcohol poisoning with than Pinot Noir, though, but you don't seem eager to join your brother any time soon."

"Thanks for the tip," she grimaced as she bent down to pick up her laptop and quickly regretted it. Eliane collapsed on the sofa and wrapped her arms around a throw pillow as nausea wreaked havoc on her senses. "I'd offer you a cup of tea, but I honestly don't think I can stand upright that long. Feel free to help yourselves."

John paused to brush off his hands as he surveyed the precarious pile of boxes next to the sofa. "The rest of your brother's belongings, the stuff he took with him to Bolivia, where is it now?"

"Well, when Emile didn't show up to pay his rent yesterday morning the hotel manager threw his stuff into the street yesterday morning," she mumbled, cradling her head gently in the palm of her hands.

Sherlock continued his survey of Eliane's bedsit and ran a finger along the dust that had accumulated on the window sill over her bed. One pillow on the bed, one chair at the table, one towel in the bathroom, one toothbrush on the sink, one coaster on the coffee table. Eliane infrequently had visitors and most certainly hadn't expected her brother to visit on the night he died. She wasn't exceptionally tidy and would have left a blanket on the sofa or a guest towel hanging on the shower door. "What about a laptop, a mobile? Valuable, sensitive items he wouldn't have left behind in some seedy little hotel halfway across the world. Could he have left them somewhere? A safety deposit box? A hiding place both of you would know?"

"I, uh... maybe," Eliane shrugged. "I don't know. I can't-"

"Think," Sherlock snapped sharply. "Somewhere you've both been. Something only _you _would know. Somewhere he could access in the evening without drawing unwanted attention. A park, a pub, a train station, a hospital."

Eliane's eyes lit up at the last suggestion. "The gym! There's a twenty-four hour gym in Soho. Uh, Emile used to go there after shift. He used to leave stuff there all the time and ask me to go pick it up on my way back home."

"Right," Sherlock announced and unceremoniously yanked Eliane off the sofa and carefully steadied her by her shoulders until the wave of nausea he inspired passed. "You, into the shower. John, there's a coffee shop at the end of the street. Dead eye, black, two sugars. Small dark roast, skim milk, one sugar."

* * *

Eliane emerged a soul-crushingly boring twenty minutes later, freshly washed, dried and dressed, wearing an almost cartoonishly large pair of hangover-inspired sunglasses and a grimace. Unfortunately, she was just still drunk enough to refuse to drive and the three of them were forced to pile into the back of a taxi. It was a tight, suffocating fit and Sherlock was instantly irritated by how impossible it was to move or think in there. Between the three of them, there was simply too much leg going on and not enough space and the way Eliane's knees kept knocking against Sherlock's every time the taxi made a hard turn, scrambled every thought and deduction he tried desperately to latch onto. This was _not _on. He simply could not work under these conditions.

When the taxi pulled up to the gym, Sherlock tossed an undetermined wad of money at the driver and practically scrambled over John's lap as threw himself onto the street, desperate for a little personal space. John dutifully collected and pocketed the change in reparations for a) yesterday, b) the coffee and c) because, well, Sherlock deserved it for being an insufferable dick all morning and keeping him up half the night soliloquising.

The gym was one of those annoyingly bright, cheery places that Sherlock went out of his way to avoid. Full of fit young specimens in tight spandex, more brawn than brain. The three of them garnered some very pointed looks from the gym's passing patrons, but an overly-tanned young woman with her hair scraped into a bun - so tight, dense and hairsprayed Sherlock wondered if it could have been bulletproof and made a note to examine that possibility on his next cadaver with adequate hair length – hopped over and beamed an impossibly white toothy grin.

A quick flash of Lestrade's badge had them inside the men's locker room with a bolt cutter in hand in under two minutes flat. Hardly a record, but it was almost scary what that cheap little bit of metal gave Sherlock unfettered access to.

"Sixty-three. That's his lucky number," Eliane announced, bobbing and weaving through the lockers.

"Only goes up to fifty six," Sherlock informed her, giving the last locked a quick tap on the number plate. "Think... he was scared, but not stupid. He was smart enough to take the side streets, avoid the main roads. Emile would have picked a locker that couldn't be seen from the entrance. There. Twenty seven."

They hustled over to the only series of lockers that couldn't be seen from the door. John quickly snapped the lock on number twenty-seven and swung the door open, revealing nothing more than a mobile. No bag, no laptop, no smoking gun, but it was a start.

Sherlock snatched it up and mashed the power button, cursing softly when the screen flickered to life and instantly began beeping a low battery warning. The mobile was brand new, still had the protective plastic screen cover on and it didn't take long for Sherlock to find the only video ever recorded on that device. Wednesday, 10:16PM.

A screenshot revealed Emile Bashir, very alive and very afraid. Lockers behind him, standing in the very spot they were. After hazarding a glance at Eliane whose dark eyes were already filling with tears, Sherlock clicked play.

_Elia! If you found this, you're more clever than I ever gave you credit for, _Emile laughed, tears flowing freely down his cheeks_. Sorry 'bout that. Big brother and all. But... oh god, I'm in over my head and I don't know how to get out. I c-can't tell you, BEEP don't want to get you involved but if you're seeing this, then I guess I'm already dead, then, aren't I?_

"Oh, how original,'" Sherlock piped up and John's elbow followed in righteous retribution. "What? It's hardly original."

"Yeah, and s_end help, I've been poisoned by MI6_ is? Twat," John cracked, yanking the mobile out of Sherlock's hand and rewinding the message.

_-already dead, then, aren't I? Guess it doesn't matter what I do now, eh? But... I need you to do one last thing for me, k, love? You have to, dying BEEP wish. You can't refuse a man's dying wish. You do, I swear, I'll haunt you so hard, _Emile joked despite the panic tainting in his voice. _There's a man, Ingram. Michael Ingram. MI6, dunno anythin' else about him. I was supposed to m-meet him at the airport, he never showed. Elia, you have to tell 'im... they know. They know that I know an' they're after m-_

_BEEP._


	10. Chapter 10

**False Flag**

Chapter Ten

As the battery died and the screen went black, Sherlock's mind was already whipping through the possibilities of what Emile Bashir's panicked message implied.

_Cocaine_.

Cocaine smuggling was the most likely deduction given the current facts and had been perched on the tip of his tongue for days now. Bolivia, Peru and Colombia alone were responsible for three-quarters of the world's cocaine production, no small feat. Emile, a gregarious, squeaky-clean Briton physician would have been a sight for sore eyes for a local cartel wishing to expand or augment their operations abroad. No wife, no children, thus, his sister would have become the target of their threats, however hollow. Though, they did manage to stab him to death in the middle of London, mere hours after he left Bolivian soil. Not quiet so hollow after all.

MI6 wasn't covering up a murder. They were covering up a mistake, an underestimation. They expected Emile to be safe on British soil, perhaps promised him a new life, a new name in exchange for his cooperation. But Emile was no spy. The video more than explained that. As soon as his handler didn't show at Heathrow, he panicked and rather than getting the hell out of London and laying low, he hopped the tube to his sister's flat, to warn her and protect her. It was the one and only place the drug cartel knew he'd show up eventually.

"Elia!" Sherlock shouted into the small mobile shop, adopting the nickname her brother had used upon seeing how quickly she responded to it in the video.

Eliane darted out of the shop and skid to an unsteady halt in front of him. "What?"

"Have you been receiving threats lately? Physical, verbal, written? Has someone been following you, at home, at work? It would have only occurred in the last... three months."

"Oh, no more threats than usual," she joked weakly, though Sherlock's dark and serious demeanor quickly sobered her. "No, I... I haven't. I would have noticed something like that."

"Would you?" Sherlock clucked derisively. "The wealth of periphery information the human mind dismisses on a daily basis is extraordinary. That man on the corner, black cap, track suit, talking on his mobile for the last five minutes. Don't you think he's dressed a bit warm for the weather?"

Eliane's attention quickly snapped to the corner in question and Sherlock took a perverse kind of pleasure in watching her eyes widen in surprise.

"He's nobody. However, the young blonde woman at the cafe across the street. Don't look," Sherlock warned as excitement and amusement quickened his breath. "She's been reading the same magazine article for the last three and half minutes and yet, doesn't seem in the slightest engrossed or amused by it. Her fingers slide up to the earpiece in her right ear every now and then, because she doesn't realise I can see her reflection in the shop window. Designer suit, designer handbag, garish gold jewelry, cheap ballet flats she instinctively tries to hide behind her chair. One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong."

"The shoes," Eliane breathed in surprise.

"You can always spot a field operative by their shoes. Sensible, flat and comfortable. A bullet will stop them but a blister will slow them down just long enough for a suspect to get away."

"MI6?" She asked, her brows furrowing in confusion. "But... I thought-"

"CIA," Sherlock neatly corrected her. "Probably just curious about us. Why we're poking around so close to their home turf. Grosvenor Square _is_ only a few minutes walk from here."

"Why the hell would the Americans care?" Eliane hissed, deliberately turning her back to the agent.

"They're entitled to a bit of curiosity, I should think. They are the ones who flew your brother's body back to Bolivia and staged it, after all. Ah, John!" Sherlock cheered as the man emerged victorious with an overpriced phone charger in hand. Unfortunately, the woman across the street's legs were tensed, her magazine abandoned and. Sherlock knew they had but only seconds to make a snap decision. "How are you at running?"

Surprisingly efficient, Sherlock found out as he grabbed fierce hold of Eliane's wrist and yanked her down the street. After a few initial hesitant stumbles, instinct kicked in and she kept up nicely as they barreled towards Oxford Circus, hoping to lose their tails in the mass of shoppers that mulled aimlessly about Regent Street.

"Are... we seriously... running from the CIA?" Eliane wheezed as they slammed into an immovable wall of bodies stuffed in a construction-narrowed walkway. "Are you mental?"

"Undoubtedly," Sherlock nodded firmly as he spun to examine his companion's wardrobe. They were too easily identifiable and the fenced in bottleneck gave them a rare opportunity that made Sherlock dizzy with excitement. Sherlock's hand shot out like a rocket and snatched a bottle of water out of a passing woman's hands without so much as a grimace of apology, and then dumped it over John's head. At least, he had the decency to keep his voice down when he snarled. "Sherlock, what the _hell_ are you doing?"

"Your hair, it's too light," Sherlock informed him as he pitched the bottle over his shoulder and shrugged his jacket off. "Slick your hair back and put this on. Elia, glasses off, hair up and stand up straight for once. We've got one shot to pull this off. Moscow Rules. King's Cross, Platform 5, half an hour."

Mercifully, his companions did as asked and they emerged on the other end of the bottleneck in complete disguise. Sherlock, dressed in his vest with his trousers slung so low he feared they might fall off, walked with limp in his best approximation of a _gangster lean_ to disguise his height_._ His arm was lazily slung over Elia's shoulder who wore his favourite blue Herringbone Turnbull & Asser shirt tucked into her jeans, her hair tamed into a hurried makeshift bun. John popped out seconds later with his hair dark and slicked back with Elia's glasses on, practically drowning in Sherlock's jacket as he tried desperately not to think about how much of a cock he looked.

"Moscow rules?" Elia couldn't help but stifle a laugh as soon as they broke away from the pack and took the separate routes to their destination. "Seriously?"

"John's something of a Le Carré aficionado," Sherlock shrugged, extracting his arm from around her shoulder to practice his lean a bit more. It seemed to be working. All manner of people were shying away, avoiding eye contact thanks to his challenging gaze. It helped him feel significantly less ridiculous. "We only need to keep them off our backs long enough to watch the rest of the video."

"God, what the hell did he get himself into?" Elia sighed, fidgeting with the sleeve of Sherlock's shirt.

Sherlock knew quite well what Emile got himself into, but detailing it to his sister didn't exactly seem the best course of action. The less she knew, the less likely she was to burst into tears and dive into that indignant, impassioned, ignorant speech everyone gave when they realised they didn't know everything about their loved one's life. "They'll be watching your flat now, if they weren't already. I'd recommend you stay with a friend until this issue is resolved."

"Absolutely not," Elia protested, shaking her head with a wry laugh. "No way I'm dragging anyone else into this mess. I'll stay at a hotel."

"Good," Sherlock grunted as determined they hadn't been followed and permitted his body to snap back to its original state, striding with with sharp determined steps. "Interior room, ground or first floor. You're going to need... at least three escape routes not including the window. Use a false name, no credit card. I've a passport you could borrow, if you want, if you don't mind dyeing your hair grey and being a fifty-six year old woman from Sheffield named Edith Parker-Pratt. You'd have to work on the accen-"

Eliane stopped suddenly and shot him an incredulous stare. "Are you... for real? I mean, I looked you up and, Christ, the things people say about you."

Sherlock very much doubted that, but gave her the benefit of the doubt. "What?"

"Oh, well... you're a military experiment gone wrong, an android, a time traveller from the future. There's a man in West Ham who's convinced you're a Draconian, and I guess this is why," she laughed, a free, crisp sound that carried over the din of the streets. "You are, for lack of a better word, a bit alien."

Sherlock pouted. "Draconian?"

"Umm, a shape-shifting reptile from Alpha Draconis that lives in the center of the earth that generally plots the demise of all mankind," Elia explained in a low breath, her eyes twinkling with mirth. "Not the kindest compliment, I must say."

"Ah, that would be Pete Gibbons, then. Former client. He tried to hired me to investigate the disappearance of his cat. Thought the New World Order was behind it."

"Were they?"

Sherlock couldn't help but grin as he hiked his trousers back up around his waist. "No. It was a Ford Fiesta."

* * *

Three hours later, Sherlock was on the verge of exploding. Despite being crouched in his favourite thinking chair, with his favourite thinking mug filled to the brim with his favourite thinking scotch, Sherlock couldn't bloody _think_. The rest of Emile Bashir's message had been nothing more than a dramatic tearful goodbye that didn't do Sherlock a damn bit of good. Every time he played the message, his mind would wander and in a last ditch effort to purge his thoughts of Elia, Sherlock allowed his mind a moment's indulgence.

She wasn't particularly repulsive. No more so than the rest of London's uninteresting, uninspired masses. In turn, nor was she particularly attractive. Her brother was, but that was largely because he was dead and the linchpin of the mystery that had livened his summer something fierce. She wasn't beautiful or witty, or quick, or wise, or brilliant. She was just a funny little thing, all hard angles and long clumsy limbs, as if she had never truly grown out of her awkward gangly adolescence. Elia wouldn't have so much as turned his head if they had crossed paths on the street and here, Sherlock was unable to get the sound of her laughter - that warm, uninhibited noise - out of his damn head.

It was hardly the first time a client -or, well, near client- caught his interest. Bright young things, male and female alike always did have a way of captivating him, reducing him to little more than a magpie until the mystery of their allure was solved. The closest thing to an explanation Sherlock could deduce at the point was that Elia looked very much like her brother and that the sight of his features on her face, alive and animated fascinated some part of his brain that worked on an unconscious level.

Surely, that must be it. His powers of deduction were simply working overtime, as they were wont to do. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, Sherlock tried to convince himself as he swallowed a burning mouthful of scotch and sank back into his chair, praying that this time, it would have the decency to swallow him whole.

* * *

The weekend's here and it'll be a few days until I upload the next chapter, so sit tight. Thanks for reading! Please leave a review or comment if you can spare the time.


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